Certainly Dr. LaTurque was not remarkably choice in the style of his "den," if he _had_ handsomely furnished apartments in the house above, and if his windows _did_ look out on Fifth Avenue. The ceilings were low, the walls plain, the furniture was very common, and yet a little odd, as became the place. The floor was oil-clothed; a table covered with dark cloth stood in the middle of the room; an old-fashioned secretary, with books piled on either end, stood against the wall on the right as the visitor entered, with a globe half hidden behind it; on the wall opposite hung the print of a muscular Apollo (muscular, because it was drawn anatomically, with no flesh covering the integuments); on either end of the mantel stood a small statue; in the centre was an impudent placard of bronze on japanned tin, announcing that no complimentary visits could possibly be received in that room, while the occupant, if there, was ready to falsify the announcement at any moment; on a small table between the windows, under a glass globe, lay the cast in plaster of a marvellously handsome male Italian face; two or three small pictures, commonly framed, hung over secretary and mantel; in the corner between the mantel and the window stood a stuffed eagle on a low table covered with the suggestive appliances of a fractured leg; and just behind it, on a bit of rug, nestled a disabled pigeon from his pet flock on the roof, that had come down, with excellent judgment, to be nursed and tended by the surgeon. In the midst of this odd assemblage Dr. LaTurque was himself not by any means the least remarkable object. He was certainly a singular-looking man, and had a fancy (or pretended to have a fancy) that he was a very homely one. He was not so, however, to any eye of taste--only striking. In figure he was tall and rather thin, but the same epithet we have applied to his arm may be used for the whole man--_wiry_. He seemed capable of strong nervous effort and of great endurance; and one could see that something more than fifty years had not diminished the locomotive will or power. In the too large and too aquiline nose (literally a beak)--in the iron-gray moustache, imperial, and heavy brown hair--in the thin cheeks and keen gray eye,--there was a marvellous reminder of the portraits of Louis Napoleon, and at the same time another and a stronger suggestion. There is no close observer of physiognomy but has remarked bird, beast and even reptile reproduced in the faces of different men--one being a human lion, another a human bear, a third a human hyena, and still a fourth a human serpent. It scarcely seemed that it could have been by chance that the gray eagle stood stuffed in the corner; for the observer just as naturally detected the eagle in that human face, as he could ever have detected either of the others named, in different physiognomies, and the dead bird seemed the _totem_ of the living man.